This Thing

For my 8 year old son, Covid-19 is 'This Thing'.

In the initial period of the lockdown he had a few simple questions: what is ‘This Thing’? When will ‘This Thing’ end? After ‘This Thing’ will we go to school, will we go on vacation?

Then the silence, normality became something else, for a long time all the same identical days, compressed spaces, time that stretches and defines life in a new way.

'This Thing' manifested itself through different and contrasting moments: the distance from the support figures including grandparents, friends, separation from the usual environments, the difficulty of online school, the absence of common meeting spaces, but also the extraordinary work of the teachers and video calls with friends and relatives, an important moment of contact; the restless nights, the getaways on mom and dad's bed, the anger, the boredom, the shelters built almost everywhere in the house, but also more time available with the parents, the hugs, the tenderness.

It was not easy for children and parents: those who tried to create a protection zone made up of mutual support, sharing, containment, those who were outraged by the denied hours outdoors, those who made the words 'will go all right ' their own, who simply have experienced the situation, being unable to do anything else.

I wonder if in our society a deep reflection is possible on how much traumatic events, symbolically powerful, affect the mind of a child, if we can face a crisis with a different type of communication, not only economic, if there is a possibility of listening for everyone.

I look at my son with his mouth covered by the mask and I see his impossibility of expression in today's society of adults; but in his gaze I also see the desire to understand, I see his deep and sincere energy that wants to tear the protection and get out, I see the reflection of another possible society.

When the restrictions of the lockdown opened a little, escaping for a few hours from the city, normal moments reappeared, the meeting with the grandparents, the game in the open air, the contact with nature ...

...and there, as for enchantment, some sentences came out on 'This Thing', the initial interpretation of a child, whose mind finally takes flight and his word regains freedom: 'I don't know how to say it', 'it's strange'.

Perhaps the man who will become, touching this old film with his hands, will think about what happened in that distant 2020, and will be able to close the circle of his thoughts and words opened when he was a kid.